Charter's Spectrum Kills Home Security Business, Refuses Refunds on Now-Worthless Equipment (gizmodo.com) 92
Charter Comunications' Spectrum cable service includes a home security service, and -- whoops. No it doesn't.
"Spectrum customers who are also users of the company's home security service are about a month away from being left with a pile of useless equipment that in many cases cost them hundreds of dollars," reports Gizmodo: On February 5, Spectrum will no longer support customers who've purchased its Spectrum Home Security equipment. None of the devices -- the cameras, motion sensors, smart thermostats, and in-home touchscreens -- can be paired with other existing services. In a few weeks, it'll all be worthless junk.
While some of the devices may continue to function on their own, customers will soon no longer be able to access them using their mobile devices, which is sort of the whole point of owning a smart device... Spectrum is hoping to smooth things over with "exclusive offers" from other home security companies, including Ring, which is owned by Amazon...
Spectrum apparently believes it can afford to aggravate these customers, some if not most of whom will have no choice but to continue paying Spectrum for internet service.
Spectrum "inherited" the business after acquiring Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016, Gizmodo reports.
"It's not offering refunds, though... The firmware on the devices doesn't allow switching to other services, either."
"Spectrum customers who are also users of the company's home security service are about a month away from being left with a pile of useless equipment that in many cases cost them hundreds of dollars," reports Gizmodo: On February 5, Spectrum will no longer support customers who've purchased its Spectrum Home Security equipment. None of the devices -- the cameras, motion sensors, smart thermostats, and in-home touchscreens -- can be paired with other existing services. In a few weeks, it'll all be worthless junk.
While some of the devices may continue to function on their own, customers will soon no longer be able to access them using their mobile devices, which is sort of the whole point of owning a smart device... Spectrum is hoping to smooth things over with "exclusive offers" from other home security companies, including Ring, which is owned by Amazon...
Spectrum apparently believes it can afford to aggravate these customers, some if not most of whom will have no choice but to continue paying Spectrum for internet service.
Spectrum "inherited" the business after acquiring Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016, Gizmodo reports.
"It's not offering refunds, though... The firmware on the devices doesn't allow switching to other services, either."
Wait don't they just use ZigBee? (Score:2)
Because in that case, they can very much still be used.
Not that that makes is any less evil.
zwave is better (Score:2, Insightful)
zwave is better
Re:zwave is better (Score:5, Informative)
All in all, I would say both are good choices. I'd recommend to think about what you want to do with this stuff first, then select equipment to meet your needs (esp. paying attention to equipment that needs to look good, like wall switches), and use whatever protocol is best supported by those devices. Or go with both: most HA hubs these days support both protocols.
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Let this be a lesson to the entitled idiots who don't read their contracts and fine print. Spectrum has every right to discontinue this service.
And angry consumers have every right to burn the place down.
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the donald duck comic clauses or "fine print" don't actually work in most of the western world, only in parts of usa.
if you were lead to believe that they would work for x amount of time, then they're up for a refund. in most of the world lets say that you bought them during the last 2 years - and they stopped working: they would either have to tear down the sale and refund or make it work again. You can't just put in the fine print that the warranty doesn't cover this product, because if you could everyone
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"Entitled" "idiots". This covers those who are cheated out of a fully functional product - which is often the case with shrinkwrap software with an internet component that stops working after some time. Retail-level customers and the like don't get to see terms of service before buying products.
Meanwhile, sane countries require devices to be suitable for the purpose they're sold for and prohibit planned obsolescence. Likewise, those countries would also require said companies to recycle those products rathe
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Not too surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had the same concern any time I buy a bit of gear which requires some external service, way back to when I bought a ReplayTV (hands up if you remember them) back in the '90s. I think it's probably more astounding this doesn't happen way more often.
Anyway, sucks if you're the Charter/Spectrum customer. Hopefully these devices weren't too expensive. I just bought and installed a set of Arlo cameras, they're not cheap, and they too are useless if Arlo goes out of business. After thinking about it, I decided I liked the benefit of cloud-connected cameras more than I feared the cameras becoming bricked if Arlo folds. We'll see how this plays out.
I decided I liked the benefit of cloud-connected c (Score:5, Interesting)
>> I decided I liked the benefit of cloud-connected cameras
>> more than I feared the cameras becoming bricked
I fear the accessibility (to others) of those cameras more than bricking. I bought an Arlo from Costco and returned it when I discovered that using it as a "video doorbell" was useless because of the delay in sending everything thru a server somewhere on the planet (probably).
Why did we fall for Cloud Connected Home in place of Smart Home? My home now has video with alarm zones, I can view from anywhere, all point to point, no cloud. The wireless video control box is in a neighbor's house so thieves can't take the evidence. Why cloud?
Re: I decided I liked the benefit of cloud-connect (Score:3)
I prefer my endpoints to be unreachable directly and have set all behind home assistant which in turn is connected by reverse proxy from the one Staten in my house blessed to receive incoming traffic.
Now one can say this might be too hard for the average consumer, but it's only because the tech companies have chosen to keep it difficult. One could easily imagine a standard for a managed router to receive solicitations for authentication and reverse proxy and have that home router provide everything I menti
Re:I decided I liked the benefit of cloud-connecte (Score:4, Interesting)
>> I decided I liked the benefit of cloud-connected cameras
>> more than I feared the cameras becoming bricked
I fear the accessibility (to others) of those cameras more than bricking. I bought an Arlo from Costco and returned it when I discovered that using it as a "video doorbell" was useless because of the delay in sending everything thru a server somewhere on the planet (probably).
Why did we fall for Cloud Connected Home in place of Smart Home? My home now has video with alarm zones, I can view from anywhere, all point to point, no cloud. The wireless video control box is in a neighbor's house so thieves can't take the evidence. Why cloud?
That delay is not cloud-based.
It's the internal motion detection and analog relay lag. I'm an electronics technician and retired IT and I've played with Arlo a lot.
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Re:Not too surprising (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Not too surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not hard to connect a generic, off-the-shelf (e.g. non-Arlo) camera to the cloud.
I won't buy cameras or other gear that require some company's continued existence just to operate. The company dies and suddenly my security system is not just offline, but dead? That's ridiculous.
If Ford or Chevy or Toyota suddenly go out of business, my cars will still work. Why should my electronics be any different?
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It's not hard to connect a generic, off-the-shelf (e.g. non-Arlo) camera to the cloud.
I won't buy cameras or other gear that require some company's continued existence just to operate. The company dies and suddenly my security system is not just offline, but dead? That's ridiculous.
If Ford or Chevy or Toyota suddenly go out of business, my cars will still work. Why should my electronics be any different?
Share this "not hard to connect generic" method, please.
Thanks.
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It's not hard to connect a generic, off-the-shelf (e.g. non-Arlo) camera to the cloud.
I won't buy cameras or other gear that require some company's continued existence just to operate. The company dies and suddenly my security system is not just offline, but dead? That's ridiculous.
If Ford or Chevy or Toyota suddenly go out of business, my cars will still work. Why should my electronics be any different?
Share this "not hard to connect generic" method, please.
Thanks.
It involves a bunch of generic Chinese cameras with terrible firmware that never gets updated, opening a few ports on your router, using something like DynDNS on the base recording unit so you can log in remotely. It’s not hard to setup just you’re probably going to get hacked and the camera used for nefarious purposes. Helped a friend setup for his bakery, after about a month his cameras were sending out about 2TB of network data a month and slowly his entire network to a crawl. We took it off
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It involves a bunch of generic Chinese cameras with terrible firmware that never gets updated, opening a few ports on your router, using something like DynDNS on the base recording unit so you can log in remotely.
I've never had to do any of those things. I've used Zoneminder and Blue Iris and all in all, it's pretty straightforward to connect a camera. They even have a "find my camera" feature just for folks like you that don't know how to do it.
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Share this "not hard to connect generic" method, please.
Thanks.
1) Buy any camera that provides ONVIF or RTSP capability.
2) Use any one of the many many many software applications that support ONVIF or RTSP. (e.g. Blue Iris, VLC, Zoneminder, Bluecherry, Cheese, tinyCam, VMS, OpenEye, AnyCam, iSpy, CAM Wizard, etc etc etc)
3) Point your software to the camera's IP, fill in any required stuff (username, password, etc).
4) Observe the video stream.
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The company dies and suddenly my security system is not just offline, but dead? That's ridiculous.
It's not the network connection which is the challenge (although Arlo did make that remarkably easy). The video is going somewhere. If someone stops paying for the servers and storage, there's no place to connect to.
(Sounds like there may be a business opportunity to create cameras which just live-stream to YouTube and other video upload services. Bring your own video account.)
Anyway, sounds like Arlo isn't the product for you. Fortunately, in our glorious free market economy, there are dozens of alternativ
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Anyway, sounds like Arlo isn't the product for you.
Which is why I don't use anything Arlo makes. It's low-end consumer-grade shit for people who want to plug stuff in without a clue as to what they're doing. The same goes for Ring and Wyze.
I use Blue Iris, a few Reolink cameras (maybe more than a few) and a well-hidden NAS that stores all the video. Even if someone found the NAS and managed to safely pull from it's hiding place without being ummm incapacitated*, all the cameras also store their video locally on the camera. I get the trigger alerts and video
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Which is why I don't use anything Arlo makes. It's low-end consumer-grade shit for people who want to plug stuff in without a clue as to what they're doing.
Here's some free advice, friend: lose the attitude. I know perfectly well what I'm doing. I made a conscious choice between cost, reliability, effort, and various threats and decided the Arlo was the best solution for me. You value different things, knock yer socks off, and that's no reason to be abrasive.
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Here's some free advice, friend: lose the attitude.
Thanks for the advice, but I'll behave as I see fit. Also, if I was giving you or anyone else "attitude", trust me, you'd know it.
But if you're looking for free advice, here's some: stop telling other people how to act.
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It's not hard
Let me stop you right there. What is "hard" for a Slashdot poster more often than not is completely different than what is "hard" for some dude walking through their local Bestbuy and looking at the pretty pictures on the front of boxes.
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...what is "hard" for some dude walking through their local Bestbuy and looking at the pretty pictures on the front of boxes.
If you're going to Bestbuy for your security system then you've already made your first mistake.
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Well here's an opportunity. A lot of Carter junk will be hitting eBay soon and if you can figure out how to make it work with your own systems you could get a lot of gear for very little money.
I don't know anything about these except what is in the summary, but if they are things like IP cameras then they are probably just ARM SoCs and with a bit of hacking you could replace the firmware. Or maybe just rip the mobo out, replace with a Pi Zero and connect up the camera.
Hence GPLv3 (Score:1)
If the firmware for your "smart" devices isn't GPLv3 then you bought the wrong devices. HTH HAND
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The average person is supposed to stop staring up their own asshole and take and interest in the world around them, and the consequences of their actions. Looking no further than the end of one's nose night have been fine for nomadic tribals but it doesn't work for people living in intermeshed economies where their actions have consequences that reach past their throwing distance.
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The average person is supposed to stop staring up their own asshole and take and interest in the world around them, and the consequences of their actions. Looking no further than the end of one's nose night have been fine for nomadic tribals but it doesn't work for people living in intermeshed economies where their actions have consequences that reach past their throwing distance.
Why should I give a fuck about London or Brussels or Beijing? Fuck 'em. Especially Beijing.
And fuck you for being such a globalist apologist.
This "oh my gaaaaawd muh feeeeeeeeeeeeels muh globalism" and theeeeenk of the chiiiiiiiildren!" has led us to the shithole country we're developing into now.
The hoi polloi better remain asleep because they don't fucking know how to vote with their brains.
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"Why should I give a fuck about London or Brussels or Beijing? Fuck 'em. Especially Beijing."
Because what happens there affects you. Are you new?
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Hopefully this will be a very good lesson for the public.
I think you pressed submit before typing the punch line. I've lost count of the number of times I've read this after a "cloud" based service has stopped service or went out of business. Leaving the customers with very expensive paper weights. Not only are the customers getting screwed, but it also creates a bunch of e-waste that will eventually end up in a landfill somewhere.
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And worse yet, despite us repeatedly talking about the "lesson" each and every time, I don't think anyone is actually learning from that lesson. The consumers keep buying it, so the companies keep making it. Some kill them when they go out of business, but some companies kill products just to force an upgrade to a newer version and make everyone buy it all again. And it works every time.
Sure a tiny minority of the population might "learn their lesson" and stop buying the stuff, but not enough to alter corpo
There is a silver lining. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe a few more repeats and enough people getting burned this way and people will start to understand how stupid it is to buy hardware that relies on somebody's cloud service that can be shut down at any time.
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Wrong lesson being learnt. The whole cloud computing "stupidity" is nothing more than an extension of a normal service industry that humans have been enjoying for hundreds of years. For the most part consumers don't have the knowledge, equipment, or capability to replicate what is being offered by cloud services. I run my own cloud file server, and I'm under no delusion that any consumer has the spare PC, will dedicate the entire weekend to set it up, pay for their own dedicated IP address, and actually man
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sued for failure to perform their side of the contract
What part of what contract can they be sued over? If you can quote it for this specific instance, or some other you know of, I would like to see it.
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No idea. I've not read their contracts. But it's a complicated case. Not all things need to be written in a contract. For example if a contract is completely one sided it can be ruled invalid even if both parties sign. Such would be the case if I bought something with the expectation to have it for a reasonable amount of time, only to have it killed within a few months and not get my money back.
Many countries don't just rely on contracts, but rather codify this in law. E.g. the Sales of Goods Act in Austral
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Why does every smart device? Power plugs/lights? Why should the devices Charter just killed have had any cloud-based service at all? It should all be done within the local device, even access from your smartphone. Manufacturers add their cloud to the loop so they can access and control your devices and any information they can. It's pervasive in everything these days. Why do samsung phones need to
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There is an invariant part of any real negotiation, in which the seller company tries to convince the purchaser that they've "been in business since 1972", and won't disappear in a cloud of ill-smelling smoke.
One often needs to do things like place one's source-code in escrow with a law firm, who in turn have been in business since 1872, to reassure the purchase that they'e not at risk of losing the service if the company goes out of business.
A good, serious effort to put together a class-action suit m
I'm sure they ran the numbers (Score:3)
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I quite agree with you re the latter (:-))
The number of successful class actions that are still happening, however, suggest to me that they're considered "expensive but unlikely". They are indeed expensive, but by no means unlikely! They're even popular in Canada (which does not have the "litigate, don't prosecute" weirdness of the US), so I don't think companies are realizing how likely they really are.
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There have already been dozens of high profile stories like this, and it hasn't changed consumer behaviour by any noticeable amount. Why would one more matter?
Always look for local control (Score:5, Insightful)
Always make sure smart devices can be controlled locally, over the local network, before investing in them.
It's sad but nearly every smart device on the market requires some server out there on the Internet that can go away. Not to mention if your internet connection goes down, you can't control your devices. This is one reason the only smart devices I've invested in so far are the Philips Hue line of light bulbs and accessories; everything is controlled locally and through an openly documented REST interface. Anyone can write software that interacts with Hue; there's even open source unix command line software!
Re: Always look for local control (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in the same situation and what I have done/am thinking about doing:
First off, I anchor most everything with home assistant. Completely untethered from cloud and when I remote access, it goes straight to my house without a cloud intermediary. My biggest complaint is they also have an optional cloud service and they could do more to indicate what devices may still require cloud services. If someone needs more convenient remote access, then get duckdns name, let's encrypt certificate, and you are good to go.
From there I added a z wave stick and prefer z wave devices. Zwave or zigbee devices cannot connect to internet even in theory, which is a huge selling point to me.
My thermostats are Trane XR524, which are zwave and have no clue what a cloud service is. I still have remote control and automation like auto adjusting when a family phone leaves home or work or school (admittedly the phone location is life360 because the options for solid phone tracking with efficient battery use is tricky)
Similar for my dimmer switches, jasco zwave dimmers, branded as ge embrighten.
I came across opengarage.io for my garage door. It is WiFi but runs open firmware and I have total local control. It has been fantastic. Again, an automation rule to automatically close the garage if a phone leaves the neighborhood and the door was left open.
I plan on adding a zwave deadbolt (mainly just to auto lock the door if forgotten) and some tasmota compatible power relays added to extension cords.
Two things that have been tricky have been voice commands and cameras.
In the first case, admittedly I don't care that much which is part of why I know very little. However it is clear that the big players have kept their trained models close to the vest and it takes a lot of data to create viable models). My local hardware is very capable, but the models just aren't available.
Cameras I haven't investigated as much either, but again a lot of the automatic events depends on machine vision and again everyone keeps their models private.
It's a shame that so many of these companies are doing everything to force subscription services when household devices could easily fulfill all the requirements to provide the features. It is an unfortunate reversal of computing history. Personal computers bright computing to the home, the internet superseded walled garden online services like prodigy and AOL. Now we got companies working feverishly to return to the bad old days with a whole lot more experience and funding behind that agenda.
Re: Always look for local control (Score:2)
I forgot to mention I'm thinking about bringing in my hard wired security system with connected.io as well, but I have not fully researched that.
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The most common way of running home assistant is on a Raspberry Pi, and those have a bunch of GPIO pins which are dead simple to use to convert your all the sensors from your hardwired security system with no added software required. Even if you run HA on something else, a Pi is dirt cheap, and it's easy to find software that will convert those GPIO signals to MQTT that HA will interface with quite happily (A Pi is actually way overkill for this, a NodeMCU or two might be better options, but require a bit m
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There are some great tutorials for this sort of stuff if you google "DIY permanent christmas lights" a good starting reference is this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/homea... [reddit.com]
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The other thing I'll say is that there's doing fancy things with RGB led controllers, or alternatively just adding a Sonoff WiFi relay if you just need on/off.
I'm not that invested in it so my knowledge is light, but from what I could see there is a lot of powerful stuff you can do, but if just on/off is needed then a wifi relay may be the ticket.
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You should also be careful about how you hook these things up. I had a coupl
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The issue is that locally controlled stuff generally costs at least double what cloud dependent stuff does (despite the company actually having lower costs themselves. Just shows how much the data scrape is worth!)
For example:
- Doorbird: $384-$1264USD
- Ring: $199-$499USD
But it's beyond doorbells:
- Z-wave smart outlets are about $35
- proprietary cloud based smart outlets are $3 (a 10th the price!)
- z-wave light bulb: $40
- proprietary cloud based light bulb $4
It doesn't help that a quick look at the Amazon we
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Always make sure smart devices can be controlled locally, over the local network, before investing in them.
Better idea: Sue companies that cease providing a service making your hardware obsolete. The service industry is a thing, always has been. The answer is not to abandon the idea of letting experts offer services and trying to do everything yourself, but rather ensuring that the service providers can't just arbitrarily walk away while saying "sucks to be you".
We need dark fiber owned by cities or counties. (Score:3)
The local government is then in control, as with water, electricity, natural gas, and sewage, for example.
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a way to watch TV with fewer than 3 remotes
That is an easy one. I have an LG OLED TV connected to an antenna on my roof via coax and a Naim soundbar via HDMI Arc. The remote that came with the TV turns it on, changes channels, and controls the sound bar's volume. It has an Amazon app built in so I can use the stuff available on Prime and the remote is all that is needed to navigate that.
I always wonder if the need for multiple remotes is due to choosing components that don't work well together, or choosing a complex array of content sources/devic
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Some people live places where an antenna on the roof provides no signal from any station, or want to watch something other than over the air broadcasts.
Re: Always look for local control (Score:2)
Checkout Lutron. I did Caseta in the entire house and itâ(TM)s rock solid. Hub with phone integration is totally separate and optional.
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Three exceptions to the rule are Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Insteon. Each of these has multiple options for an on-premise controller which in many cases can run entirely independent of the cloud.
Zigbee is an open standard, and Z-Wave recently announced [androidpolice.com] that they're moving that direction; previously companies wanting to implement the protocol bought their interface chips from the sole supplier,
Insteon was one of the first "smart home" standards, and still has the best support for tying controls and sensors
Open standards are important (Score:2)
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This is exactly why i'm waiting for security equipment that operate on open standards and can be used with any service.
Hopefully nobody steals all your shit while you're waiting for a company with a failed business model to emerge.
Re:Open standards are important (Score:4, Informative)
This is exactly why i'm waiting for security equipment that operate on open standards and can be used with any service.
You should have stopped waiting years ago. Install ZoneMinder and get some IP cameras.
ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum) (Score:2)
So ONVIF?
ONVIF is a global and open industry forum with the goal of facilitating the development and use of a global open standard for the interface of physical IP-based security products. ONVIF creates a standard for how IP products within video surveillance and other physical security areas can communicate with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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There are several such standards. Zigbee comes immediately to mind, and while z-wave doesn't technically qualify as an "open standard" it's close enough for this specific purpose. Both have multiple options for hubs, many of which work with any service, locally, or cloud connected, and you can even roll your own with something like home assistant.
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Home Security needs licensing good thing cable is (Score:2)
Home Security needs licensing good thing cable is getting out of it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Right to repair is interesting and there is a good chance of regulations being realistic to intervene with the likes of John Deer to stop their BS and enable independent repair.
Consumer electronics gets to play a more fun game of:
a) By and large the customers don't care enough to notice except when their investment goes belly up, and even then the cost of replacing it is generally less than the trouble of bitching about it. Here maybe Spectrum has to face a class action lawsuit as a cost for discontinuing
Get a dog for your home security (Score:1)
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A cloud once congealed and made the solar system so all water is from a cloud!
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No thanks. My home security system should be plug and play and not need walking, feeding, need its shit cleaned up, it should not smell, damage the floor, or cause the neighbours to be pissed when owners invariably ignore them to do things like go to work.
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I can't stand dogs. My security is provided by Smith & Wesson.
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How's that work when you're not at home? I missed their announcement of a sentry gun
not the first nor the last (Score:4, Informative)
I got burned by tcp connected when they quit supporting their smartbulbs. they were one of the first but had their own standard so I was out of several hundred dollars worth of useless bulbs.
On a smaller scale amazon, roku and others quit supporting their older devices recently so customers had to purchase new devices if they wanted to continue streaming.
Charter is big enough and they could at least help their Spectrum customers with some of the costs of switching over to another system.
I am afraid we will see this more and more.
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The Cloud (Score:1)
The Cloud: Just say no.
If you're gonna rent, rent. If you're gonna buy, buy. But don't confuse the two.
more info plz (Score:1)
what make/model were the provided devices?
12 bottles of beer + USBJTAG = pwn anything.
People never learn (Score:2)
Hardware that is exclusively tied to one provider is a very bad idea and you can EXPECT it all to become useless sooner or later.
Oh well, this is boom times for the junk man.